What she says is true, Ragle thought to himself. As he listened to her, he began to imagine the death and suffering... dark weeds growing in the ruins of towns, corroded metal and bones scattered across a plain of ash without contour. No life, no sounds...

And then he experienced, without warning, an awful sense of danger. The near presence of it, the reality, crushed him. As it fell onto him he let out a croak and half-jumped from his chair. Mrs. Keitelbein paused. Simultaneously all of them turned toward him.

Wasting my time, he thought. Newspaper puzzles. How could I escape so far from reality?

"Are you feeling unwell?" Mrs. Keitelbein asked.

"I'm -- okay," he said.

One of the class raised her hand.

"Yes, Mrs. F.," Mrs. Keitelbein said.

"If the Soviets send over their missiles in one large group, won't our anti-missile missiles, by the use of thermonuclear warheads, be able to get a higher percentage than if they are sent over in small successive waves? From what you said last week--"

"Your point is well made," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "In fact, we might exhaust our anti-missile missiles in the first few hours of the war, and then find that the enemy did not plan to win on the basis of one vast single attack analogous to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but planned rather to win by a sort of hydrogen 'nibbling away,' over a period of years if necessary."

A hand came up.

"Yes, Miss P.," Mrs. Keitelbein said.

A blurred portion detached itself, a woman saying, "But could the Soviets afford such a prolonged attack? In World War Two, didn't the Nazis find that their economy wouldn't support the daily losses of heavy bombers incurred in their round-the-clock raids on London?"

Mrs. Keitelbein turned to Ragle. "Perhaps Mr. Gumm could answer that," she said.

For a moment Ragle did not grasp that she had addressed him. All at once he saw her nodding at him. "What?" he said.

"Tell us the effect losses of heavy bombers had on the Nazis," she said. "From the raids on England."

"I was in the Pacific," he said. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know anything about the European Theater." He could not remember anything about the war in Europe; in his mind nothing but the sense of immediate menace remained. It had driven everything else out, emptied him. Why am I sitting here? he asked himself. I should be -- where?

Tripping across a country pasture with Junie Black... spreading out a blanket on the hot, dry hillside, among the smells of grass and afternoon sun. No, not there. Is that gone, too? Hollow outward form instead of substance; the sun not actually shining, the day not actually warm at all but cold, gray and quietly raining, raining, the god-awful ash filtering down on everything. No grass except charred stumps, broken off. Pools of contaminated water...

In his mind he chased after her, across a hollow, barren hillside. She dwindled, disappeared. The skeleton of life, white brittle scarecrow support in the shape of a cross. Grinning. Space instead of eyes. The whole world, he thought, can be seen through. I am on the inside looking out. Peeking through a crack and seeing -- emptiness. Seeing into its eyes.

"It's my understanding," Mrs. Keitelbein said, in answer to Miss P., "that the German losses of experienced pilots were more serious than the losses in planes. They could build planes to replace those shot down, but it took months to train a pilot. This illustrates one change in store for us in the next war, the first Hydrogen War; missiles will not be manned, so there will be no experienced pilots to be depleted. Missiles won't stop coming over simply because nobody exists to fly them. As long as factories exist, the missiles will keep coming."

On her desk, before her, lay a mimeographed sheet. Ragle understood that she had been reading from it. A prepared program made up by the government.

It's the government that's talking, he thought to himself. Not simply a middle-aged woman who wants to be doing something useful. These are facts, not the opinions of a single person.

_This is reality_.

And, he thought, I am in it.

"We have some models to show you," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "My son Walter made them up... they show various vital installations." She motioned to her son, and he got to his feet and came toward her.

"If this country is to survive the next war," Walter said in his youthful tenor, "it will have to learn a new way to produce. The factory as we know it now will be wiped off the face of the globe. An underground industrial network will have to be brought into being."

For a moment he disappeared from sight; he had gone off into a side room. Everyone watched expectantly. When he returned he carried a large model which he set down before them all, on his mother's desk.

"This shows a projected factory system," he said. "To be built a mile or so underground, safe from attack."

Everyone stood up to see. Ragle turned his head and saw, on the desk, a square of turrets and spires, replicas of buildings, the minarets of an industrial enterprise. How familiar, he thought. And the two of them, Mrs. Keitelbein and Walter, bending over it... the scene had occurred before, somewhere in the past.

Getting up he moved closer to look.

A magazine page. Photograph, but not of a model; phototraph of the original, of which this was a model.

Did such a factory exist?

Seeing his intensity, Mrs. Keitelbein said, "It's a very convincing replica, isn't it, Mr. Gumm?"

"Yes," he said.

"Have you ever seen anything like it before?"

The room became silent. The shapes of people listened.

"Yes," he said.

"Where?" Mrs. Keitelbein said.

He almost knew. He almost had an answer.

"What do you suppose a factory like that would turn out?" Miss P. said.

"What do you think, Mr. Gumm?" Mrs. Keitelbein said.

He said, "Possibly -- aluminum ingots." It sounded right. "Almost any basic mineral, metal, plastic or fiber," he said.

"I'm proud of that model," Walter said.

"You should be," Mrs. F. said.

Ragle thought, I know every inch of that. Every building and hall. Every office.

I've been inside that, he said to himself. Many times.

After the Civil Defense class he did not go home. Instead, he caught a bus and got off downtown, in the main shopping district.

For a time he walked. And then, across from him, he saw a wide parking lot and building with a sign reading: LUCKY PENNY SUPERMARKET. What an immense place, he thought to himself. Everything for sale except ocean-going tugs. He crossed the street and stepped up onto the concrete wall that surrounded the parking lot. Holding his arms out to balance himself, he followed the wall to the rear of the building, to the high steel-plated loading dock.

Four interstate trucks had backed up to the dock. Men wearing cloth aprons loaded up dollies with cardboard cartons of canned goods, mayonnaise bottles, crates of fresh fruits and vegetables, sacks of flour and sugar. A ramp composed of free-spinning rollers permitted smaller cartons, such as cartons of beer cans, to be slid from the truck to the warehouse.

Must be fun, he thought. Tossing cartons on that ramp and seeing them shoot down, across the dock and into the open door. Where somebody no doubt takes them off and stacks them up. Invisible process at the far end... the receiver, unseen, laboring away.

Lighting a cigarette, he strolled over.

The wheels of the trucks had a diameter equal to his own height, or nearly so. Must give a man a sense of power to drive one of those interstate rigs. He studied the license plates tacked to the rear door of the first truck. Ten plates from ten states. Across the Rockies, the Utah Salt Flat, into the Nevada Desert... snow in the mountains, hot glaring air in the flatlands. Bugs splattering on the windshield. A thousand drive-ins, motels, gas stations, signboards. Hills constantly in the distance. The dry monotony of the road.